


Some thoughts on Ishmael, the storyteller, my lover, my everything.

by pocketsizedquasar



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: Also nonbinary tashtego, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mutual Pining, Nonbinary Character, Pining, love these dorks, minor cw for, queequeg is very in love with his silly husband
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:20:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23202370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketsizedquasar/pseuds/pocketsizedquasar
Summary: A companion piece to "Some thoughts on Queequeg..."; another self-indulgent series of short blurbs, from a Queequeg who is very in love with his soft, stupid husband.
Relationships: Ishmael/Queequeg (Moby Dick)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 57





	Some thoughts on Ishmael, the storyteller, my lover, my everything.

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22024699)

Ishmael is a peculiar man, and I love him endlessly for it. 

I do not understand everything about him, and I love him — I love the parts of him I do not, cannot, will never understand. He is unlike anyone I have ever met, he is a dozen contradictions and odd habits and inconsistencies, witty and brilliant and naive and untried and oblivious and  _ confusing _ . He is so...different from me, strange and wildly unfamiliar, but recognizable all the same. When I am with him, I feel at ease. At home.

He is the first thing that has felt like home to me since I left it.

\--

He really does talk a lot. 

Not too much. Never too much. But a lot.

\--

When we first met I was afraid. 

Not like he was afraid of me. Not in the same way. 

He thought I would hurt him. I would never have laid a hand on him, not really. And not for the reason he thinks. 

If I even touched him it could have been my head. 

When I woke with my arm thrown over him I was terrified. I’ve seen men like me hang for less, at the word of a man like him. His whiteness a weapon he didn’t know he wielded.

Even after sitting with him, talking with him, beside that fireplace, I was still wary. Less so, from that soft and rambling voice and that gentle touch and those friendly smiles in my direction, but still, I was afraid. Afraid of him, afraid of myself already slowly beginning to love him, afraid of what that could mean. 

In the end it turned out I needn’t have worried. 

But still. 

\--

I’ve tried to explain to him since, what his whiteness is, what that means for me. That though I trust him with my life, though I love him more than anything, there was, for a long time, still a sliver of doubt, of fear, of that silent power. A necessary fear. 

He doesn’t quite understand it. Doesn’t understand why I care about these things, about his skin and mine, where I am from, what makes us different, doesn’t understand why I  _ have  _ to care about them, why they are important to me. 

But he listens, and he tries. 

And I think he will. 

\--

I love his stories. 

They’re rarely about him, but when he tells them it still feels like he is giving me parts of himself. 

\--

_ Damn _ , is the man oblivious. 

\--

It is, I think, Ishmael’s softness that saved me. Saves me. I love how soft he is, when he has every reason not to be. In our early days, I mistook it for fragility, delicacy. I did not know what to do with all of it; to be honest, I was afraid of it, afraid of breaking him, afraid of damaging this peculiar and fragile man I had come across. 

I was wrong. His softness is not weakness. 

I still, in many ways, do not know what to do with it. He overwhelms me, sometimes; he is — he is soft and safe and warm and right, so right, in a way that nothing else I have ever known is. He loves gently, soft touches in passing and slow kisses and quiet laughter. Warm smiles. 

I didn’t know how much I needed that. 

It was his softness I became drawn to, those early days together, or that first night we spent by the fireplace. That openness, that vulnerability, pulled me to him, a certainty, a direction —  _ this one needs me _ — and then a realization —  _ and I need this _ . 

I didn’t know, then, how much I would come to love him, but I knew that I would protect that softness, that safety, that spark of home; I knew I would protect him with my life. 

\--

For longer than I remember I have been fighting. More since I came here, to this strange land, with its strange people and their strange language, strange ways. Fighting to keep myself, protect myself, justify myself. To prove myself to...something. Fighting to survive. 

It is... it is nice to not have to do that with him. To not have to explain myself. He came to me on his own. Loves without question. 

It’s a good change of pace. 

\--

Tash and Dag teased me endlessly for this, for loving Ishmael, for not telling him for so long. They took every chance to nag me like schoolboys until I finally did, Daggoo with his wry smiles and less-than-subtle nudges, Tashtego and their sharp-tongued quips and quiet whispers. They’ve only teased more since Ishmael’s started to join us. 

I don’t mind, really. I am just happy the three of them get along. I love all of them dearly; truly, I love them like family. And...I at least partially have their teasing and prodding and jeering to thank for this — I’m not sure how much longer I would’ve waited to tell Ishmael how I felt without Tashtego’s negging. 

I’d never tell them that, though. 

\--

Loving Ishmael is easy. Kiss him good morning when he wakes in my arms, sleep still clinging to his eyelids; sneak him small bits of meat, fruit, cheese from the harpooners’ meals; listen to his stories by lamplight and sea breeze. He is an easy man to love, beautiful in more ways than I can count. 

(Of course,  _ falling  _ in love with him was easy, too. Didn’t even notice it was happening, at first. I woke up on the ship one morning with him all tangled against me, in my bunk and not his because he couldn’t sleep alone, still sleeping, still breathing soft and steady, still smiling lightly, and  _ oh _ . I knew.) 

Loving him is the easiest thing in the world.

\--

Helping him is — harder. Convincing him he is worthy of this, of me, of us, convincing him that there is nothing wrong with this, with me, with us. 

That is one thing, and — I think I've helped. A little.

But getting him to talk to me, tell me when something is wrong — and with Ishmael, something is very often wrong — is something else. I do not entirely understand the nature of his troubles. The ones that have been plaguing him, following him, since well before we left shore, well before I knew him. I do not know these demons. All I know is that he will sometimes wake in the middle of the night, sobbing against my chest, that he gets what he has described as “ _ unwelcome _ ” thoughts, that there are scars peppering his arms that I suspect are not from his time at sea, that he has told me more than once with an apologetic look and a half-empty smile that I have — somehow — saved his life. 

And I don’t know what to do in those times.

It seems I have helped. A little. And he always insists I have. But I’m not quite sure. I don't always know the right things to do, or the right things to say. Especially not in his language, still so strange to my ears and my tongue. I don’t quite know how to help him, only how to love him, and I hope that that is enough. 

\--

He has the hands of an artist, not a whaler. 

The first lowering left his hands cracked and blistered, sensitive to the touch. To his credit, he complained little, insisted he was fine (and, really, Ishmael seems to have a worrying tendency to hide his hurt, but that is something else entirely), but his skin was riddled with criss crossing cracks and lines like a captain’s chart. Those hands were made for writing, for the sketches of the crew and the sea and the sky he so carefully renders in his journal, for when he laces his fingers through mine and smiles, not this. 

Even now, many months and many lowerings later, his hands are still soft to hold. 

\--

Ishmael feels life so fully, so painfully, that it's impossible to not feel some of that with him. Everything is so much to him, the world is so much to him. It is infectious. Things that were once benign to me, or even irritating — the sameness of the sky and waves, those infamous and terrifying squalls round the Cape of Good Hope, the faraway cry of sky-hawks — all of it is beautiful to my Ishmael, and through him it’s become beautiful to me. Now I can’t look at a passing cloud without wondering what Ishmael would say of it, how he would describe its curves and shadows with that wide-eyed wonder of his, cannot keep watch at the masthead without thinking of Ishmael and his rambling philosophies and naked adoration of that endless ringed horizon. He's made my life all the more colorful just by being in it. He looks at the world like no one I’ve ever known; he sees wonder and light and beauty in everything and makes everything brighter just by seeing it. 

\--

I hope perhaps to get him to see that light in himself. 

\--

When I left home I didn’t really know why. 

What I told Ishmael when we first met was true, yes — I wanted to see the world. But there was more, as I told to him later, alone and hidden away with him in some dark corner of the ship, more driving me away, driving me to sea, there was suffering and losses and  _ feeling  _ lost and something — something eating away at me, chasing me from my home, from my family, chasing me to sea without me ever knowing why. 

(I guess it was, like Ishmael pointed out, not entirely unlike the mess of demons that chased him out here, too.)

I wandered alone for years. Each day feeling less and less like I could return home. Feeling the weight, the  _ wrongness _ , of this strange world and its strange people seeping into me; knowing I could not return home, not like this, but not knowing  _ why _ , not knowing why I had been forced to wander and drift, no destination in sight, knowing  _ where  _ I was but still  _ lost  _ in every sense of the word, still losing, losing, lost.

And then I found Ishmael. 

And of course, of course, this was it. 

This is what I was wandering towards. 

\--

He told me once he would come with me. If I ever went home again. No hesitation, no uncertainty. Just a promise to be there,  _ “for as long as you will have me. I would follow you anywhere.” _

\--

Every time that I think it wouldn’t be possible to love someone more. 

He surprises me. 

\--

He has the heart of a poet, a wanderer, a lover, not a whaler. 

He fares well enough out here; he is stronger than he looks and braver than he thinks and takes in the chaos and the violence and the bloodshed with the best of them. But he is not made for this. 

Perhaps none of us is. 

\--

There is something brewing on the horizon. I don’t know what it is, but it terrifies me. I know Ishmael is afraid too, I know Tash and Dag are afraid, I know we all are afraid. 

I was alone before him, before them, and I am afraid of being alone again. Of wandering alone, of losing this home we've made. I can pretend, for them, I can be a brave face and insist everything will be all right, for them, but I and we all know I am just as terrified.

There is not much I can do but fight. Fight for them, for every day we have, fight like it is all I know because it is. Fight to hold onto them, fight for every quiet evening passing around a pipe, for every one of Tash's snide remarks, every awful joke from Daggoo, every night I get to fall asleep in Ishmael’s arms, fight for every single second that I get with them. 

Maybe there is an end coming, but I will fight it till the last. 

\--

I have wanted to go home for a long time. I miss it so much it aches, day after day after day, that dull ache of absence coming and coming in slow and endless waves. I want to go home and it hurts. 

But sometimes. 

Sometimes I wake up to his soft brown eyes and gentle smile, and he looks at me like he is seeing me for the first time; and sometimes he will come up behind me and wrap his arms around my waist and kiss the back of my neck; and sometimes he will hold me and listen to me tell him about home while rubbing soft circles into my back; and sometimes he will tell me his own stories, stories he reserves just for my ears; and sometimes I will find him on the ship, aloft and alone, and hold him close and kiss him till the morning comes; and sometimes I will just be near him, with him, arms softly brushing, eyes briefly meeting, hearts full and fluttering, and I know, I know, I know. I am home. 

**Author's Note:**

> hey lads it's been a hot minute. started writing this way back in January but life has been Doing Things. hope you enjoy! feel free to head over and read [Ishmael's version of this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22024699) if you haven't already (or read it again if you have)


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